"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley
CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse built a soul earthquake on a spaghetti-western sample, watched it make chart history — then deliberately pulled it from stores so nobody would get sick of it. It worked.
"Crazy" arrived March 13, 2006, the debut single from Gnarls Barkley — the duo of CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse — off their album St. Elsewhere. The track was built on a sample of "Last Men Standing" from the 1968 spaghetti western Django, Prepare a Coffin, and the lyric grew out of a conversation about how people won't take an artist seriously unless they seem insane.
Then it made chart history. On April 2, 2006, "Crazy" became the first single ever to top the UK chart on download sales alone, and it stayed at #1 for nine consecutive weeks — at which point the duo and their label did something almost unheard of: they deleted the single from stores on May 29, so people would "remember the song fondly and not get sick of it." It still finished as the UK's best-selling single of 2006. In the US it spent seven consecutive weeks stuck at #2 on the Hot 100, somehow never reaching the top while being the only song anyone played.
The Rorschach-inkblot music video, directed by Robert Hales, won MTV VMAs for Best Direction and Best Editing; the song took the 2007 Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance and a Record of the Year nomination. In 2009, Rolling Stone ranked "Crazy" the #1 song of the entire decade — not bad for a single its own creators took off the shelves.
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